PEORIA, Illinois (Reuters) - By all accounts, Sandy Wright of Mackinaw, Illinois, is a challenging patient. The spunky 69-year-old with a rare autoimmune disease has been in the hospital more than a dozen times since she was first diagnosed in 1997.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nearly half of the United States is reporting widespread influenza activity, most of it attributed to the H1N1 virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 2009, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The family of a 13-year-old girl declared brain dead after a tonsillectomy gone wrong will be allowed to take their daughter to a new facility without removing the ventilator that is keeping her heart and lungs working.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Every July, U.S. hospitals take on new doctors-in-training and others are promoted. Some studies have found there are more medical errors and patient deaths around this time of year.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Parents who let their teens use electronic devices or watch TV during family meals tend to serve less nutritious food and have poorer family communication, a new study suggests.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women using intrauterine devices (IUDs) and other types of long-term reversible birth control after having a baby are less likely to get pregnant again quickly, a new study suggests.

(Reuters) - General Mills Inc said it has stopped using genetically modified ingredients in the popular breakfast cereal Cheerios as the U.S. branded foods manufacturer hopes the move will firm up customer loyalty in the face of growing opposition to such additives.

LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers on Friday criticized government spending of 424 million pounds ($702 million) to stockpile Roche's medicine Tamiflu, saying doubts about the drug's effectiveness suggest it may not be money well spent.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Young teens who binge eat and those who are fearful of weight gain may be more likely to become overweight later in adolescence, according to a new study from the United Kingdom.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Young teens who binge eat and those who are fearful of weight gain may be more likely to become overweight later in adolescence, according to a new study from the United Kingdom.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Parents who let their teens use electronic devices or watch TV during family meals tend to serve less nutritious food and have poorer family communication, a new study suggests.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's Bayer expects a campaign to accelerate the pace of new discoveries of ingredients for pharmaceuticals and pesticides to yield results as early as 2016, a management board member said.

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists seeking a cure for AIDS say they have been inspired, not crushed, by a major setback in which two HIV positive patients believed to have been cured found the virus re-invading their bodies once more.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If you're a novice driver, dialing a phone is more dangerous than retrieving text messages, and reaching for an object while driving is more likely to produce an accident than eating behind the wheel.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - The world's first trial of a dengue fever vaccine being developed by France's Sanofi Pasteur and due for release in 2014 has seen "very promising" results in Thailand, a specialist involved in the tests said on Friday.

BERLIN (Reuters) - New data shows that bean sprouts are the most likely source of the outbreak of E.coli which has killed 30 people so far, all but one of them in Germany, the country's health authorities said on Friday.

LONDON (Reuters) - A novel variant of swine flu has emerged in Asia with a genetic adaptation giving some resistance to Roche's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, the two mainstay drugs used to tackle the disease.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong has ordered GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) to recall an pediatric antibiotic manufactured in France over the presence of a plasticizer in the product, raising safety and quality concerns.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Health officials in Ohio said on Thursday that eight people had been sickened in the state as a result of a growing salmonella outbreak that federal officials say has now spread to 15 states.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - World leaders at a U.N. AIDS summit launched a plan on Thursday to try to eliminate by 2015 most new HIV infections among children, who inherit the condition from already infected mothers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A class of drugs meant to improve symptoms of an enlarged prostate gland actually increase the chance of getting a more serious form of prostate cancer, health officials said on Thursday.

LONDON (Reuters) - Millions of children's lives and billions of dollars could be saved if vaccines were more widely available in 72 of the world's poorest countries, according to a series of studies published on Thursday.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Washington's governor on Friday vetoed most provisions of bill to establish state licensing for cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana, saying she did not want to put state employees at risk of federal prosecution.

TUSCALOOSA, Alabama (Reuters) - When the first ambulance pulled up to Tuscaloosa's main hospital after Wednesday's tornadoes, trauma coordinator Andrew Lee opened its doors to a sickening sight: three dead children.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Pregnant women who live or work with smokers may be at slightly higher risk of having a stillbirth, suggests a study that adds to evidence that even secondhand smoke can harm unborn babies.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.S. envoy to the United Nations told the Security Council on Thursday that troops loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi were increasingly engaging in sexual violence and some had been issued the impotency drug Viagra, diplomats said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hospitals that improve medical care for elderly patients, and reduce deadly errors, will get millions of dollars under an incentive program launched on Friday that aims to cut overall Medicare costs.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Parents may soon be able to find out if their unborn child is prone to any inherited diseases, researchers said on Thursday, after developing a non-invasive technique to draw the entire gene map of the human fetus. By analyzing a sample of the mother's blood, which contains DNA from the fetus, scientists in Hong Kong and the United States were able to identify all the DNA strands that belong to the child and piece them together.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - More than 30 million Americans admit to drunken driving in the previous 12 months and more than 10 million say they drove while on illicit drugs, according to a survey of driving habits between 2006 and 2009.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Children from homes where incense is regularly burned have a higher risk of developing asthma, according to a Taiwanese study suggesting that a particular genetic variation could also be involved.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The biggest overhaul of the U.S. food safety system in decades took a major step toward becoming law on Wednesday when House Democratic leaders folded it into a must-pass bill to fund the U.S. government.